For Fatima Daffeh, a senior at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, every day is a battle. She and her fellow students fight over seats in their classrooms and for space in the school’s crowded hallways. It’s not uncommon, she says, for a teacher to run out of books. 

The school, a large, hulking building on Mosholu Parkway, is somewhat of an institution in its northwest Bronx neighborhood—it boasts a stream of celebrity alumni, like writer James Baldwin and actor Tracy Morgan. While she likes her school, Fatima says she doesn’t want her younger brother and sister to follow in her footsteps by going there. 

“It’s just too crowded,” she said. “Just getting inside the school is a hassle.”

District 10, where Clinton is located, is one of the most crowded districts in the city, according to a report published by the City Comptroller’s office last September. Primary schools there operate at 112 percent of capacity, while intermediate schools are at 103 percent. Thousands of students are taught inside some kind of annex or temporary classroom, according to the report—more than in any other district. 

Residents in the northwest Bronx have been fighting for years for sufficient school space, with claims that the Department of Education’s construction plans for the area fall well short of what’s actually needed. 

“We need more space,” Schools Chancellor Joel Klein acknowledged at a press conference last spring. “We’ve opened up around 75,000 or 100,000 additional seats over the last eight years. It’s clear to me that we need more.”

This September, the DOE announced the opening of 26 new school locations to address the city’s growing student population, with about 17,000 new classroom seats, the most ever added in a school year. 

Six of these facilities are in the Bronx, including 490 new seats at PS 94, on Kings College Place. The school then gave the use of their educational annex to nearby PS 56, on East 207th Street, which — so far — appears to have helped with space issues at the two schools.

“It’s looking better,” said Marvin Shelton, president of District 10’s Community Education Council, though he said it might be too early in the school year to tell.  “I haven’t heard any horror stories of parents getting turned away, or having to stick their students on a bus, which is what they had to do the last two years .”

But the new additions aren’t necessarily enough to fix the district’s crowding problems.

While many Bronx schools make use of temporary or shared classrooms, other reports reveal that many also lack basic facilities. A survey from former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion’s office, released in 2008, asked principals from schools throughout the Bronx questions about the needs of their school facilities. Large numbers of respondents said their building had no auditorium, music room, nor science or computer labs. Many schools are forced to turn these spaces into conventional classrooms to accommodate an overflowing number of students.

Flor Cabrera, a parent leader with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a community group that advocates on education issues, has two young children in local public schools. Their classes are too large, she says, for most students to get individualized attention. 

Her daughter’s fifth grade class last year at PS 79, for example, had 32 students.

“It’s just way too many fifth graders for a teacher to handle,” she continued. “Even the best teacher.”